Is the ‘anti-globalization movement’ anything of the kind?
Active resistance is true globalization, David Graeber maintains, and its
repertoire of forms is currently coming from the arsenal of a reinvented
anarchism.

DAVID GRAEBER

THE NEW ANARCHISTS

It’s hard to think of another time when there has been such a
gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and
its practitioners. Writers who for years have been publishing essays that sound
like position papers for vast social movements that do not in fact exist seem
seized with confusion or worse, dismissive contempt, now that real ones are
everywhere emerging. It’s particularly scandalous in the case of what’s still,
for no particularly good reason, referred to as the ‘anti-globalization’
movement, one that has in a mere two or three years managed to transform
completely the sense of historical possibilities for millions across the
planet. This may be the result of sheer ignorance, or of relying on what might
be gleaned from such overtly hostile sources as the New York Times;
then again, most of what’s written even in progressive outlets seems largely to
miss the point—or at least, rarely focuses on what participants in the movement
really think is most important about it.

As an anthropologist and active participant—particularly in the
more radical, direct-action end of the movement—I may be able to clear up some
common points of misunderstanding; but the news may not be gratefully received.
Much of the hesitation, I suspect, lies in the reluctance of those who have
long fancied themselves radicals of some sort to come to terms with the fact
that they are really liberals: interested in expanding individual freedoms and
pursuing social justice, but not in ways that would seriously challenge the
existence of reigning institutions like capital or state. And even many of
those who would like to see revolutionary change might not feel entirely happy
about having to accept that most of the creative energy for radical politics is
now coming from anarchism—a tradition that they have hitherto mostly
dismissed—and that taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a
respectful engagement with it.

I am writing as an anarchist; but in a sense, counting how many
people involved in the movement actually call themselves ‘anarchists’, and in
what contexts, is a bit beside the point.
[1]
There are some who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they are sometimes reluctant to call themselves ‘anarchists’ for that very reason. The very notion of direct action, with its rejection
of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour
of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures
an alternative—all of this emerges directly from the libertarian tradition.
Anarchism is the heart of the movement, its soul; the source of most of what’s
new and hopeful about it. In what follows, then, I will try to clear up what
seem to be the three most common misconceptions about the movement—our supposed
opposition to something called ‘globalization’, our supposed ‘violence’, and
our supposed lack of a coherent ideology—and then suggest how radical
intellectuals might think about reimagining their own theoretical practice in
the light of all of this.

A globalization movement?

The phrase ‘anti-globalization movement’ is a coinage of the US
media and activists have never felt comfortable with it. Insofar as this is a
movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism, which can be defined as
a kind of market fundamentalism—or, better, market Stalinism—that holds there
is only one possible direction for human historical development. The map is
held by an elite of economists and corporate flacks, to whom must be ceded all
power once held by institutions with any shred of democratic accountability;
from now on it will be wielded largely through unelected treaty organizations
like the IMF, WTO or NAFTA. In Argentina, or Estonia, or Taiwan, it would be
possible to say this straight out: ‘We are a movement against neoliberalism’.
But in the US, language is always a problem. The corporate media here is
probably the most politically monolithic on the planet: neoliberalism is all
there is to see—the background reality; as a result, the word itself cannot be
used. The issues involved can only be addressed using propaganda terms like
‘free trade’ or ‘the free market’. So American activists find themselves in a
quandary: if one suggests putting ‘the N word’ (as it’s often called) in a
pamphlet or press release, alarm bells immediately go off: one is being
exclusionary, playing only to an educated elite. There have been all sorts of
attempts to frame alternative expressions—we’re a ‘global justice movement’,
we’re a movement ‘against corporate globalization’. None are especially elegant
or quite satisfying and, as a result, it is common in meetings to hear the
speakers using ‘globalization movement’ and ‘anti-globalization movement’
pretty much interchangeably.

The phrase ‘globalization movement’, though, is really quite
apropos. If one takes globalization to mean the effacement of borders and the
free movement of people, possessions and ideas, then it’s pretty clear that not
only is the movement itself a product of globalization, but the majority of
groups involved in it—the most radical ones in particular—are far more
supportive of globalization in general than are the IMF or WTO. It was an
international network called People’s Global Action, for example, that put out
the first summons for planet-wide days of action such as J18 and N30—the latter
the original call for protest against the 1999 WTO meetings in Seattle. And PGA
in turn owes its origins to the famous International Encounter for Humanity and
Against Neoliberalism, which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of
rainy-season Chiapas, in August 1996; and was itself initiated, as
Subcomandante Marcos put it, ‘by all the rebels around the world’. People from
over 50 countries came streaming into the Zapatista-held village of La
Realidad. The vision for an ‘intercontinental network of resistance’ was laid
out in the Second Declaration of La Realidad: ‘We declare that we will make a
collective network of all our particular struggles and resistances, an
intercontinental network of resistance against neoliberalism, an
intercontinental network of resistance for humanity’:

This, the Declaration made clear, was ‘not an organizing
structure; it has no central head or decision maker; it has no central command
or hierarchies. We are the network, all of us who resist.’

The following year, European Zapatista supporters in the Ya
Basta! groups organized a second encuentro in Spain, where the idea of
the network process was taken forward: PGA was born at a meeting in Geneva in
February 1998. From the start, it included not only anarchist groups and
radical trade unions in Spain, Britain and Germany, but a Gandhian socialist
farmers’ league in India (the KRRS), associations of Indonesian and Sri Lankan
fisherfolk, the Argentinian teachers’ union, indigenous groups such as the
Maori of New Zealand and Kuna of Ecuador, the Brazilian Landless Workers’
Movement, a network made up of communities founded by escaped slaves in South
and Central America—and any number of others. For a long time, North America
was scarcely represented, save for the Canadian Postal Workers’ Union—which
acted as PGA’s main communications hub, until it was largely replaced by the
internet—and a Montreal-based anarchist group called CLAC.

If the movement’s origins are internationalist, so are its
demands. The three-plank programme of Ya Basta! in Italy, for instance, calls
for a universally guaranteed ‘basic income’, global citizenship, guaranteeing
free movement of people across borders, and free access to new technology—which
in practice would mean extreme limits on patent rights (themselves a very
insidious form of protectionism). The noborder network—their slogan: ‘No One is
Illegal’—has organized week-long campsites, laboratories for creative
resistance, on the Polish–German and Ukrainian borders, in Sicily and at Tarifa
in Spain. Activists have dressed up as border guards, built boat-bridges across
the River Oder and blockaded Frankfurt Airport with a full classical orchestra
to protest against the deportation of immigrants (deportees have died of
suffocation on Lufthansa and KLM flights). This summer’s camp is planned for
Strasbourg, home of the Schengen Information System, a search-and-control
database with tens of thousands of terminals across Europe, targeting the
movements of migrants, activists, anyone they like.

More and more, activists have been trying to draw attention to
the fact that the neoliberal vision of ‘globalization’ is pretty much limited
to the movement of capital and commodities, and actually increases barriers
against the free flow of people, information and ideas—the size of the US
border guard has almost tripled since the signing of NAFTA. Hardly surprising:
if it were not possible to effectively imprison the majority of people in the
world in impoverished enclaves, there would be no incentive for Nike or The Gap
to move production there to begin with. Given a free movement of people, the
whole neoliberal project would collapse. This is another thing to bear in mind
when people talk about the decline of ‘sovereignty’ in the contemporary world:
the main achievement of the nation-state in the last century has been the
establishment of a uniform grid of heavily policed barriers across the world.
It is precisely this international system of control that we are fighting
against, in the name of genuine globalization.

These connexions—and the broader links between neoliberal
policies and mechanisms of state coercion (police, prisons, militarism)—have
played a more and more salient role in our analyses as we ourselves have
confronted escalating levels of state repression. Borders became a major issue
in Europe during the IMF meetings at Prague, and later EU meetings in Nice. At
the FTAA summit in Quebec City last summer, invisible lines that had previously
been treated as if they didn’t exist (at least for white people) were converted
overnight into fortifications against the movement of would-be global citizens,
demanding the right to petition their rulers. The three-kilometre ‘wall’
constructed through the center of Quebec City, to shield the heads of state
junketing inside from any contact with the populace, became the perfect symbol
for what neoliberalism actually means in human terms. The spectacle of the
Black Bloc, armed with wire cutters and grappling hooks, joined by everyone
from Steelworkers to Mohawk warriors to tear down the wall, became—for that
very reason—one of the most powerful moments in the movement’s history.
[3]
Helping tear it down was certainly one of the more exhilarating experiences of this author’s life.

There is one striking contrast between this and earlier
internationalisms, however. The former usually ended up exporting Western
organizational models to the rest of the world; in this, the flow has if
anything been the other way around. Many, perhaps most, of the movement’s
signature techniques—including mass nonviolent civil disobedience itself—were
first developed in the global South. In the long run, this may well prove the
single most radical thing about it.

Billionaires and clowns

In the corporate media, the word ‘violent’ is invoked as a kind
of mantra—invariably, repeatedly—whenever a large action takes place: ‘violent
protests’, ‘violent clashes’, ‘police raid headquarters of violent protesters’,
even ‘violent riots’ (there are other kinds?). Such expressions are typically
invoked when a simple, plain-English description of what took place (people
throwing paint-bombs, breaking windows of empty storefronts, holding hands as
they blockaded intersections, cops beating them with sticks) might give the
impression that the only truly violent parties were the police. The US media is
probably the biggest offender here—and this despite the fact that, after two
years of increasingly militant direct action, it is still impossible to produce
a single example of anyone to whom a US activist has caused physical injury. I
would say that what really disturbs the powers-that-be is not the ‘violence’ of
the movement but its relative lack of it; governments simply do not know how to
deal with an overtly revolutionary movement that refuses to fall into familiar
patterns of armed resistance.

The effort to destroy existing paradigms is usually quite
self-conscious. Where once it seemed that the only alternatives to marching
along with signs were either Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience or
outright insurrection, groups like the Direct Action Network, Reclaim the
Streets, Black Blocs or Tute Bianche have all, in their own ways, been trying
to map out a completely new territory in between. They’re attempting to invent
what many call a ‘new language’ of civil disobedience, combining elements of
street theatre, festival and what can only be called non-violent
warfare—non-violent in the sense adopted by, say, Black Bloc anarchists, in
that it eschews any direct physical harm to human beings. Ya Basta! for example
is famous for its tute bianche or white-overalls tactics: men and
women dressed in elaborate forms of padding, ranging from foam armour to inner
tubes to rubber-ducky flotation devices, helmets and chemical-proof white
jumpsuits (their British cousins are well-clad Wombles). As this mock army
pushes its way through police barricades, all the while protecting each other
against injury or arrest, the ridiculous gear seems to reduce human beings to
cartoon characters—misshapen, ungainly, foolish, largely indestructible. The
effect is only increased when lines of costumed figures attack police with
balloons and water pistols or, like the ‘Pink Bloc’ at Prague and elsewhere,
dress as fairies and tickle them with feather dusters.

At the American Party Conventions, Billionaires for Bush (or
Gore) dressed in high-camp tuxedos and evening gowns and tried to press wads of
fake money into the cops’ pockets, thanking them for repressing the dissent.
None were even slightly hurt—perhaps police are given aversion therapy against
hitting anyone in a tuxedo. The Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc, with their
high bicycles, rainbow wigs and squeaky mallets, confused the cops by attacking
each other (or the billionaires). They had all the best chants: ‘Democracy? Ha
Ha Ha!’, ‘The pizza united can never be defeated’, ‘Hey ho, hey ho—ha ha, hee
hee!’, as well as meta-chants like ‘Call! Response! Call! Response!’
and—everyone’s favourite—‘Three Word Chant! Three Word Chant!’

In Quebec City, a giant catapult built along mediaeval lines
(with help from the left caucus of the Society for Creative Anachronism) lobbed
soft toys at the FTAA. Ancient-warfare techniques have been studied to adopt
for non-violent but very militant forms of confrontation: there were peltasts
and hoplites (the former mainly from the Prince Edwards Islands, the latter
from Montreal) at Quebec City, and research continues into Roman-style shield
walls. Blockading has become an art form: if you make a huge web of strands of
yarn across an intersection, it’s actually impossible to cross; motorcycle cops
get trapped like flies. The Liberation Puppet with its arms fully extended can
block a four-lane highway, while snake-dances can be a form of mobile blockade.
Rebels in London last Mayday planned Monopoly Board actions—Building Hotels on
Mayfair for the homeless, Sale of the Century in Oxford Street, Guerrilla
Gardening—only partly disrupted by heavy policing and torrential rain. But even
the most militant of the militant—eco-saboteurs like the Earth Liberation
Front—scrupulously avoid doing anything that would cause harm to human beings
(or animals, for that matter). It’s this scrambling of conventional categories
that so throws the forces of order and makes them desperate to bring things
back to familiar territory (simple violence): even to the point, as in Genoa,
of encouraging fascist hooligans to run riot as an excuse to use overwhelming
force against everybody else.

One could trace these forms of action back to the stunts and
guerrilla theater of the Yippies or Italian ‘metropolitan Indians’ in the
sixties, the squatter battles in Germany or Italy in the seventies and
eighties, even the peasant resistance to the expansion of Tokyo airport. But it
seems to me that here, too, the really crucial origins lie with the Zapatistas,
and other movements in the global South. In many ways, the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) represents an attempt by people who have always been
denied the right to non-violent, civil resistance to seize it; essentially, to
call the bluff of neoliberalism and its pretenses to democratization and
yielding power to ‘civil society’. It is, as its commanders say, an army which
aspires not to be an army any more (it’s something of an open secret that, for
the last five years at least, they have not even been carrying real guns). As
Marcos explains their conversion from standard tactics of guerrilla war:

Now the EZLN is the sort of army that organizes ‘invasions’ of
Mexican military bases in which hundreds of rebels sweep in entirely unarmed to
yell at and try to shame the resident soldiers. Similarly, mass actions by the
Landless Workers’ Movement gain an enormous moral authority in Brazil by
reoccupying unused lands entirely non-violently. In either case, it’s pretty
clear that if the same people had tried the same thing twenty years ago, they
would simply have been shot.

In the late nineteenth century most people honestly believed
that war between industrialized powers was becoming obsolete; colonial
adventures were a constant, but a war between France and England, on French or
English soil, seemed as unthinkable as it would today. By 1900, even the use of
passports was considered an antiquated barbarism. The ‘short twentieth century’
was, by contrast, probably the most violent in human history, almost entirely
preoccupied with either waging world wars or preparing for them. Hardly
surprising, then, that anarchism quickly came to seem unrealistic, if the
ultimate measure of political effectiveness became the ability to maintain huge
mechanized killing machines. This is one thing that anarchists, by definition,
can never be very good at. Neither is it surprising that Marxist parties —who
have been only too good at it—seemed eminently practical and realistic in
comparison. Whereas the moment the Cold War ended, and war between
industrialized powers once again seemed unthinkable, anarchism reappeared just
where it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, as an international
movement at the very centre of the revolutionary left.

If this is right, it becomes clearer what the ultimate stakes of
the current ‘anti-terrorist’ mobilization are. In the short run, things do look
very frightening. Governments who were desperately scrambling for some way to
convince the public we were terrorists even before September 11 now feel
they’ve been given carteblanche; there is little doubt that
a lot of good people are about to suffer terrible repression. But in the long
run, a return to twentieth-century levels of violence is simply impossible. The
September 11 attacks were clearly something of a fluke (the first wildly
ambitious terrorist scheme in history that actually worked); the spread of
nuclear weapons is ensuring that larger and larger portions of the globe will
be for all practical purposes off-limits to conventional warfare. And if war is
the health of the state, the prospects for anarchist-style organizing can only
be improving.

Practising direct democracy

A constant complaint about the globalization movement in the
progressive press is that, while tactically brilliant, it lacks any central
theme or coherent ideology. (This seems to be the left equivalent of the
corporate media’s claims that we are a bunch of dumb kids touting a bundle of
completely unrelated causes—free Mumia, dump the debt, save the old-growth
forests.) Another line of attack is that the movement is plagued by a generic
opposition to all forms of structure or organization. It’s distressing that,
two years after Seattle, I should have to write this, but someone obviously
should: in North America especially, this is a movement about reinventing
democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of
organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization
are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal
networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations;
networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus
democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately
it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. But unlike many other forms of
radicalism, it has first organized itself in the political sphere—mainly
because this was a territory that the powers that be (who have shifted all
their heavy artillery into the economic) have largely abandoned.

Over the past decade, activists in North America have been
putting enormous creative energy into reinventing their groups’ own internal
processes, to create viable models of what functioning direct democracy could
actually look like. In this we’ve drawn particularly, as I’ve noted, on
examples from outside the Western tradition, which almost invariably rely on
some process of consensus finding, rather than majority vote. The result is a
rich and growing panoply of organizational instruments—spokescouncils, affinity
groups, facilitation tools, break-outs, fishbowls, blocking concerns,
vibe-watchers and so on—all aimed at creating forms of democratic process that
allow initiatives to rise from below and attain maximum effective solidarity,
without stifling dissenting voices, creating leadership positions or compelling
anyone to do anything which they have not freely agreed to do.

The basic idea of consensus process is that, rather than voting,
you try to come up with proposals acceptable to everyone—or at least, not
highly objectionable to anyone: first state the proposal, then ask for
‘concerns’ and try to address them. Often, at this point, people in the group
will propose ‘friendly amendments’ to add to the original proposal, or
otherwise alter it, to ensure concerns are addressed. Then, finally, when you
call for consensus, you ask if anyone wishes to ‘block’ or ‘stand aside’.
Standing aside is just saying, ‘I would not myself be willing to take part in
this action, but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it’. Blocking is a way
of saying ‘I think this violates the fundamental principles or purposes of
being in the group’. It functions as a veto: any one person can kill a proposal
completely by blocking it—although there are ways to challenge whether a block
is genuinely principled.

There are different sorts of groups. Spokescouncils, for
example, are large assemblies that coordinate between smaller ‘affinity
groups’. They are most often held before, and during, large-scale direct
actions like Seattle or Quebec. Each affinity group (which might have between 4
and 20 people) selects a ‘spoke’, who is empowered to speak for them in the
larger group. Only the spokes can take part in the actual process of finding
consensus at the council, but before major decisions they break out into
affinity groups again and each group comes to consensus on what position they
want their spoke to take (not as unwieldy as it might sound). Break-outs, on
the other hand, are when a large meeting temporarily splits up into smaller
ones that will focus on making decisions or generating proposals, which can
then be presented for approval before the whole group when it reassembles.
Facilitation tools are used to resolve problems or move things along if they
seem to be bogging down. You can ask for a brainstorming session, in which
people are only allowed to present ideas but not to criticize other people’s;
or for a non-binding straw poll, where people raise their hands just to see how
everyone feels about a proposal, rather than to make a decision. A fishbowl
would only be used if there is a profound difference of opinion: you can take
two representatives for each side—one man and one woman—and have the four of
them sit in the middle, everyone else surrounding them silently, and see if the
four can’t work out a synthesis or compromise together, which they can then
present as a proposal to the whole group.

Prefigurative politics

This is very much a work in progress, and creating a culture of
democracy among people who have little experience of such things is necessarily
a painful and uneven business, full of all sorts of stumblings and false
starts, but—as almost any police chief who has faced us on the streets can
attest—direct democracy of this sort can be astoundingly effective. And it is
difficult to find anyone who has fully participated in such an action whose
sense of human possibilities has not been profoundly transformed as a result.
It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is possible’. It’s another to experience
it, however momentarily. Perhaps the best way to start thinking about these
organizations—the Direct Action Network, for example—is to see them as the
diametrical opposite of the sectarian Marxist groups; or, for that matter, of
the sectarian Anarchist groups.
[6]
What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North East Federation of Anarchist Communists—whose members must accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by Nestor Makhno—do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists are the real locus of historical dynamism right now.
Where the democratic-centralist ‘party’ puts its emphasis on achieving a
complete and correct theoretical analysis, demands ideological uniformity and
tends to juxtapose the vision of an egalitarian future with extremely
authoritarian forms of organization in the present, these openly seek
diversity. Debate always focuses on particular courses of action; it’s taken
for granted that no one will ever convert anyone else entirely to their point
of view. The motto might be, ‘If you are willing to act like an anarchist now,
your long-term vision is pretty much your own business’. Which seems only
sensible: none of us know how far these principles can actually take us, or
what a complex society based on them would end up looking like. Their ideology,
then, is immanent in the anti-authoritarian principles that underlie their
practice, and one of their more explicit principles is that things should stay
this way.

Finally, I’d like to tease out some of the questions the
direct-action networks raise about alienation, and its broader implications for
political practice. For example: why is it that, even when there is next to no
other constituency for revolutionary politics in a capitalist society, the one
group most likely to be sympathetic to its project consists of artists,
musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated
production? Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first
imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or
collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives—particularly, the
possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity?
One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a
kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed;
actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two
categories most broadly overlap.

This would, at least, help explain why it almost always seems to
be peasants and craftsmen—or even more, newly proletarianized former peasants
and craftsmen—who actually overthrow capitalist regimes; and not those inured
to generations of wage labour. It would also help explain the extraordinary
importance of indigenous people’s struggles in the new movement: such people
tend to be simultaneously the very least alienated and most oppressed people on
earth. Now that new communication technologies have made it possible to include
them in global revolutionary alliances, as well as local resistance and revolt,
it is well-nigh inevitable that they should play a profoundly inspirational
role.

[5] ‘In 1905–1914 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body of Marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism.’ Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Bolshevism and the Anarchists’, Revolutionaries, New York 1973, p. 61.

[6] What one might call capital-A anarchist groups, such as, say, the North East Federation of Anarchist Communists—whose members must accept the Platform of the Anarchist Communists set down in 1926 by Nestor Makhno—do still exist, of course. But the small-a anarchists are the real locus of historical dynamism right now.